February 7, 2009

…and that there are audio clips on demand on the internet of President Obama saying awesomely profane things. These aren’t fake — they’re excerpts from the audio recording of his best seller, “Dreams from My Father.” I wish I could embed these, but WordPress has some annoying restrictions on scripts. All I can do is give you this link to where I found them — it has the recordings (language NSFW), text transcripts, as well as the author’s suggestions as to when he should use that quote throughout his day-to-day presidential business.

January 26, 2009

Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland have successfully teleported information from one atom to another at a distance of about a meter — something that has never been done before. Successful teleportation of information, accomplished using quantum-mechanical phenomena like entanglement, has occurred over great distances, as well as over atomically small distances using an intermediary, but never at this human scale. While this doesn’t mean that we’re one step closer to “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” it does represent a significant step forward in the field of quantum computing.

January 24, 2009

Today I Learned…

…how to total my car. It’s very easy, actually. Just have the car two cars in front of you stop at a green light because they missed their on-ramp. Then plow into the Volvo in front of you. That pretty much does the trick.

Nobody was hurt except for the Tardis, which is pretty much done moving through time and space under its own power. More details coming as they warrant.

January 20, 2009

Today I Learned…

…where the term “tip” comes from. It is /not/, as my coworker Livy insisted, an acronym for “to insure promptness.” This is probably a backronym of some kind (and incorrect, as it does not use the grammatically correct “ensure”). According to Wikipedia, the word comes from the 16th century German verb tip, which meant “to give, hand, or pass” and “to tap.”

Also interesting is that the current German word for a tip is the unrelated word Trinkgeld, which literally translates to “drink money.” That’s exactly what many of us are using it for.

For more info, and information on tipping customs around the world, check out the Wikipedia article.

January 19, 2009

Today I Learned…

…that the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals will meet in Tampa on Feburary 1st in Super Bowl XLIII. While the Steelers will be going for their sixth Super Bowl title (which would give them more than any other team) and second in four years, the Cardinals will play in the first Super Bowl in franchise history and have not won a championship in 61 years — the second longest such streak in North American professional sports (behind, duh, the Cubs).

I’m a little sad that the Baltimore Ravens didn’t win yesterday, because if the Cardinals had beaten them in the Super Bowl, I believe they would have become the first team in NFL history to beat four other teams with bird mascots in a single season, as they already beat the Eagles, Falcons, and Seahawks this season. That would have been kind of funny.